Napster. This one word, this one company, is the cause of a great deal of talk in not only the media, but between people all across our country. Everybody is asking questions. How does it work? Who is behind it? What are the laws behind all these court cases? . Napster is a file sharing community, for music, on the Internet. Quite a few of the major music companies are suing the music sharing communities, like Napster, claiming copyright violations. They say that this is damaging to music sales. These allegations against these companies are far from the truth. Person to person file sharing communities such as Napster, are neither unlawful nor harmful to the music industry.
             Downloading music on the Internet has been going on for quite a few years. When it first started people would search the Internet and illegally download music files from web pages in a format known as MP.3. MP.3's are just a compressed form of a song, which makes it faster and easier to download from the Internet. The websites came out that you could download music for free and easily find it. Almost immediately there were many court cases that were won by the record companies against websites such as MP3.com and Scour. The record companies thought they had won the battle against digital music sharing.
             This was about the time that Napster's founder, Shawn Fanning, 19 at the time, wrote the code for Napster. He was a freshman computer-science major at Boston's Northeastern University. He originally wrote the program for a computer project where he had to come up with a program that would be helpful to him and others. He decided to create a program where he could share some of his own musical creations and to please his roommate whom was always complaining about unreliable MP3 search engines. It was perfect timing and at the perfect place. It got released all over campus, and soon spread to other campuses across the country. These colleges served...